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© Ploughshare Innovations Ltd 2024. Registered in England and Wales No. 04401901
An improved ‘continuous air monitor’ (CAM) design has been developed by engineers at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) to work in a wide variety of settings without requiring manual configuration. This technology is portable and easy to set up, providing real-time, accurate air monitoring to ensure the safety of workers.
In environments where nuclear materials are directly handled or machined, such as nuclear power stations and other spaces with the potential for contamination to become airborne, the air needs to be monitored on a continual basis to check there are no human-made radioactive airborne particles that could be breathed in by operators working in the room. To facilitate this, CAM systems are now considered best practice: they continually monitor the air and raise an alarm when small amounts of additional radioactive particles are detected.
However, background subtraction (which enables the detection of harmful levels of particles by comparing them to the safe base levels already present in an environment) is a significant challenge in CAM systems. The parameters of safe levels of airborne particles are inputted by the user, and this is an error-prone activity.
Incorrect choices of parameters are common, and can result in higher than desirable alarm thresholds or high false alarm rates. If the parameters are set too high, the result can be workers potentially being exposed to a larger dose of harmful particles before an alarm is raised. If the parameters are set too low, false alarms can become too frequent, meaning that, over time, workers may lose confidence in the technology which is there to protect them, and there is even a risk of alarms being ignored.
Engineers at AWE have designed a vastly improved CAM technology to overcome these setup challenges and achieve the best possible reduction in false alarm rates. In this new technology, the CAM is able to operate with minimal user input, meaning that the margin of human error in the parameters being set is significantly reduced – improving both accuracy and worker safety, and preventing costly mistakes where time is lost to false alarms.
The system also provides remote, real-time status information to a building’s ‘supervisory control and data acquisition’ (SCADA), which enables users to ‘see’ the levels of particles away from the equipment, mitigating the potential risk to the operators checking the readings. This is a positive development from previous options on the market where standalone equipment was used that did not offer remote updates.
In addition, the technology is able to operate in a wide range of background environments, without the need for repeated manual configurations. As this design is portable, there is ease of use and transit between locations.
This innovation significantly improves the practicality and ease of use compared with previous options. The AWE-CAM technology saves power stations time in setting up and repeatedly configuring the technology, reduces costs and lost time due to false alarms, and improves safety for workers in ensuring parameters are accurate.
With future developments and adaptions, it is possible that this technology could be tailored to a wide range of factory and manual work environments across a range of industries – keeping workers safe by monitoring potentially harmful levels of dust or other chemical particles in the air. There is also the potential for this technology to be adapted to detect asbestos in the air in older buildings.
If you would like to discuss this technology or collaboration opportunities with our team, please get in touch below.
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© Ploughshare Innovations Ltd 2024. Registered in England and Wales No. 04401901